Publications (27)
Morphological Cognition: Classifying MNIST Digits Through Morphological Computation Alone
Alican Mertan, Nick Cheney
With the rise of modern deep learning, neural networks have become an essential part of virtually every artificial intelligence system, making it difficult even to imagine differen…
Controller Distillation Reduces Fragile Brain-Body Co-Adaptation and Enables Migrations in MAP-Elites
Alican Mertan, Nick Cheney
Brain-body co-optimization suffers from fragile co-adaptation where brains become over-specialized for particular bodies, hindering their ability to transfer well to others. Evolut…
Hands-free Evolution of 3D-printable Objects via Eye Tracking
Nick Cheney, Jeff Clune, Jason Yosinski +1
Interactive evolution has shown the potential to create amazing and complex forms in both 2-D and 3-D settings. However, the algorithm is slow and users quickly become fatigued. We…
The Genomic Code: The genome instantiates a generative model of the organism
Kevin J. Mitchell, Nick Cheney
How does the genome encode the form of the organism? What is the nature of this genomic code? Inspired by recent work in machine learning and neuroscience, we propose that the geno…
Modular Controllers Facilitate the Co-Optimization of Morphology and Control in Soft Robots
Alican Mertan, Nick Cheney
Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and…
Continual learning under domain transfer with sparse synaptic bursting
Shawn L. Beaulieu, Jeff Clune, Nick Cheney
Existing machines are functionally specific tools that were made for easy prediction and control. Tomorrow's machines may be closer to biological systems in their mutability, resil…